Art Event 1
Martin Brief
The conceptual artist, Martin Brief, came to speak in March on his body of work. He works as an assistant professor of studio art. He broke up his lecture by the six projects he recently had worked on. All six projects had similarities with each other both visually and conceptually. The work normally includes drawing-based, hand written text that looks to explore the interaction between language and information in relation to modern culture. His full-fledged concepts all request lengthy periods of work to create the finished productions of his work.
I most enjoyed his project entitled, “Amazon god.” In this project he created, as he described as a “contemporary portrait of god.” Essentially, he typed the word “god” into an Amazon search. He narrowed the search down to only books. From this list, he created a captivating visual of the list, where the word “god” in the titles are matched up in a line. The titles create a varying linear effect. What was most interesting to me about this project, was how he used two integral aspects of society’s foundation to provoke different social commentary. God and religion is something our society allows to affect secular decisions, to see a search of it in a seemingly never-ending stream is definitely impactful. To mix this with Amazon as a source to create this list from furthers thought on the developing field of information.
Overall I thought it was a really different, provoking way to attack thought on language and source information. I also thought his work was successful because he managed equilibrium between his formal concepts and the visual aspect of his work. It also went well with our class’s discussions on source information, because he was moving through these concepts as well. His work’s sources went from the series on words from the dictionary to word searches on Amazon.com.